As Mideast Process Proceeds, Will American Jewish Groups Be a Help or Hindrance?

By Allan C. Brownfeld

While the 21st century so far has seen mainly violence and repression in Israel/Palestine, there are some reasons for hope that the Middle East peace process will move forward.

In late December, both Israeli and Palestinian leaders endorsed a proposal by British Prime Minister Tony Blair for a new international conference that would pave the way toward new peace negotiations.

“My purpose is to be of help to the Palestinian Authority and its people,” said Blair, “so that we can get back to the ‘road map’ negotiations toward the two-state solution and the viable Palestinian state at the end of it that we all want to see.”

In his first term, American President George W. Bush embraced Ariel Sharon as a “man of peace,” and did not pursue his “road map” with any degree of vigor. Nor is the departure of Secretary of State Colin Powell, an advocate of the road map and of placing pressure on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, and his replacement by Condoleezza Rice, who is close to the Pentagon neoconservatives—who have opposed placing any pressure upon Israel and, in some cases, the peace process itself—a hopeful sign.

Clearly, one reason for Bush’s embrace of Sharon was domestic politics. He apparently believed that to increase the Republican share of Jewish votes it was necessary to support the Sharon government’s hard-line stance. Most American Jewish organizations have joined in supporting the Sharon government’s position—even though public opinion polls show that the overwhelming majority of American Jews support a two-state solution and the withdrawal of Israel from the West Bank.

There is, as Henry Siegman, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former head of the American Jewish Congress and the Synagogue Council of America, points out, much irony in American Jewish support for a policy of oppressive occupation.

Writing in the Dec. 2, 2004 New York Review of Books Siegman declared: “It is one of the ironies of history that Jews—whether in the U.S., Europe or Israel—who were disproportionately involved in struggles for human rights and civil liberties should now be supporting policies of a right-wing Israeli government that is threatening to turn Israel into a racist state. If Sharon leverages his promised withdrawal from Gaza into an Israeli presence in the West Bank that is impossible to dislodge—a point that some observers insist has already been reached—a racist regime is surely what his policies will produce. That likelihood is a nightmare hardly limited to Sharon’s critics on the left. Even the right-wing Ehud Olmert, Israel’s deputy prime minister, has warned that an apartheid state is the direction in which the Jewish state is heading. Nahum Barnea, Israel’s most respected political commentator, recently wrote that ‘Thirty seven years after the occupation, in the eyes of a large part of the world Israel has become a pariah country. It’s not yet the South Africa of apartheid, but definitely from the same family.’”

The Price Sharon Will Pay

According to Siegman, “Sharon is not about to agree to the minimal conditions for a workable Palestinian state. His unshakable resolve to avoid dealing with Palestinians...and to widen Jewish settlement activity throughout the West Bank, which has increased following the announcement of his disengagement plans, gives the lie to such wishful thinking. The latest report from Israel’s Peace Now Settlement Watch found that building and infrastructure construction is taking place at 474 settlement sites where expansion of new construction deviates from the existing boundaries of the settlements, in violation of promises made by Sharon to President Bush...the growth and extent of major settlements in the West Bank are now being carried out to help divide it into three noncontiguous Palestinian cantons, in effect Bantustans that Palestinians could inhabit under Israeli surveillance without having a unified state of their own...For Sharon, withdrawal from Gaza is the price Israel must pay if it is to complete the cantonization of the West Bank under Israel’s control...”

In an interview with the Oct. 8, 2004 Haaretz, Dov Weissglas, Sharon’s closest friend and colleague who serves as the prime minister’s senior adviser and chief of staff, described the content and purpose of Sharon’s disengagement from Gaza. Weissglas bluntly asserted that the disengagement which he and Sharon persuaded President Bush and both houses of Congress to endorse was actually intended to prevent a peace process, to consign Bush’s road map to oblivion, and to preclude the emergence of a Palestinian state of any kind. “Evidently the only ones who still don’t get it, despite Weissglas’s painstaking clarifications, are the officials in Washington,” declared Henry Siegman.

What Siegman urges is an international conference to adopt principles for the resolution of the major permanent status issues posed by Israel’s continued occupation of Palestine. “Those principles,” he stated, “are widely known and widely supported...In addition to the requirement that the pre-l967 border must be the starting point of the negotiations, a stipulation already contained in the road map, they would also include the following provisions: that territorial changes be based on equal exchanges on both sides of that border; that the right of return of Palestinian refugees be exercised in the new state of Palestine, not in Israel; and that Arab sections of East Jerusalem become part of the Palestinian state and serve as its capital. In addition, special arrangements will have to be made for the [Temple] Mount/Haram al-Sharif.”

If the U.S. were to support such a conference, and American and European Jewish groups were to express support for such a peace settlement, rather than encouragement for current Sharon policies, a final agreement would, Siegman believes, be the likely outcome.

Indeed, more and more prominent American Jews who were once committed to Zionism have altered their views. Aryeh Cohen, chair of the Rabbinics Department at the Zeigler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism, provided this assessment in the December 2004 Sh’ma: “And so in the harsh reality of the ongoing morning-after of my decades-long Zionist affair, I took stock. American Judaism was not dying. Far from becoming a spiritual and intellectual wasteland drawing sustenance from Jerusalem, the Diaspora—especially the North American Diaspora—has flourished. There are both Jewish universities and universities with important Jewish studies departments, in addition to a plethora of yeshivot and seminaries of all ideological stripes.”

Rejecting the idea that Israel is “central” to Jewish life, Cohen declared: “The American Jewish community stands in a long tradition of Diasporic communities—from Philo’s Alexandria before the turn of the millennium to Sura and Nehardea of sixth century Sassanian Persia, to Kairouan in tenth century North Africa, Toledo Sarragossa and Gerona in the Spanish Golden Age, Spires, Worms, Dampierre and Ramerupt of 12th to 14th century Franco-Germany, centuries of Jewish civilization in Vilna, Warsaw. Medzibezh, and Lodz, Fes, Izmir and Baghdad, Berlin and Paris. The culture produced in these Jewish communities are not merely books on the shelf of Judaism, they are Judaism itself.”

Discussing the contemporary American Jewish community and the fear of free and open debate about Israel and the Middle East on the part of self-appointed “leaders,” Cohen noted that “...here we are, probably the most learned, most affluent, most politically powerful Jewish community in the history of the world, and we are tied in knots about who we are. The borders of accepted speech are assiduously patrolled by self-appointed guardians of the walls. (I have a file of hate mail, letter after letter of people comparing me to a kapo, and I am far from alone in this.) The public domain of our institutions and the popular Jewish press has been colonized by the most right-wing element of our community. Israel is a problem for me because it claims to speak for the Jewish community, and the Jews who speak for it confound and subvert that Judaism that I love and teach—the Judaism that can contribute to creating a better and more just world.”

In Cohen’s view, American Jews “are in a position to embrace a Torah that speaks to our deeper selves while at the same time commanding us to do justice in the world. The rabbinic tradition of social and economic justice can and should be read through the filter of Jeremiah’s charge to the newly exiled Jewish people in Babylon: ‘Seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you and pray to the Lord in its behalf; for in its prosperity shall you prosper’ (Jeremiah 29:7). Rather than reacting to the enlightenment by cutting loose non-ritual Jewish law, we should be universalizing it—arguing that there is much to be gained from a serious engagement between Jewish conceptions of civil and criminal law and American society.”

Urging that the American Jewish community move beyond “T-shirt slogans,” Frances Kreimer, a student at Columbia University, writes in the same issue of Sh’ma: “’Wherever We Stand, We Stand With Israel,’ claims T-shirts, posters and other Hillel paraphernalia. While the slogan conveys a common sentiment of many Zionist institutions, it does not resonate with many young Jews, like me. We consider ourselves heirs to powerful and varied dialogues with tradition; our contemporary challenge is not to force our communities to speak with one voice, but rather engage in multiple ongoing Jewish conversations. While many Jews look to Israel to provide a uniting identity, in reality, Israel only proves the impossibility of such unity, and underscores the need to expand the conversation.”

For the vast majority of American Jews Israel remains a largely peripheral interest.

Noted Kreimer, “Three years before my bat mitzvah, the bullet that killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shattered hope for thousands and my understanding of Jewish identity. I learned of the assassination during havdalah in Brooklyn, where my Reconstructionist synagogue’s teen group was spending a weekend in a Lubavitch community. While I was challenged by concepts of gender, observance and tradition, I was also aware of the similarities I shared with my host family, and fascinated by the challenge of finding out what made us all ‘Jewish.’ I was stunned when my hosts uttered approval of the assassination, stating that Rabin’s assassin had ‘fulfilled a mitzvah.’ I refused to accept this as a definition of religious commandment. Despite or because of the deep fractures regarding Israel, some Jews (particularly those interested in pluralism) are beginning to explore self-definitions that do not focus on a Zionist state. We may look to Jewish histories of evolving traditions, languages, and cultures that thrived for millennia before Israel. My Jewish identity is a dialogue with these histories.”

Kreimer concluded: “This does not mean that I ignore Israel. The historical and liturgical relationships of Judaism to the land of Israel are deep and compelling. And I am morally implicated by a government that purports to speak in my name and act on my behalf as it denies another people self-determination upon which Zionism is allegedly founded. My Jewish identity pushes me to ask questions about justice and think critically about what communities I claim and who claims to speak for me. As a Jew, I want to ask these questions in the context of the texts, liturgy and histories that constitute the continuing conversations that are my true birthright.”

While Jewish organizations place Israel—and support for the Sharon government—at the “center” of their agenda, for the vast majority of American Jews Israel remains a largely peripheral interest. Indeed, those who are proclaimed—and proclaim themselves—“Jewish leaders” may speak for a very small constituency, largely themselves.

Editorialized The Forward of Sept. 24, 2004: “It’s been apparent for decades now that America’s Jewish community does not have leaders as most people understand the term. There are those who run institutions, chair committees and deliver sermons, but few can be called leaders in the normal sense, because there’s nobody following. You would never guess American Jews’ opinions from listening to the groups that speak for them publicly. Attacks...are demonized as veiled anti-Semitism, putting critics on the defensive and skewing the debate. Most American Jews view themselves as an American constituency with its own interests.”

The Forward cited a survey of Jewish opinion released in September 2004 by the American Jewish Committee. When asked the quality that respondents consider most important to their Jewish identity, religion and social justice scored 14 percent and 20 percent. Support for Israel came in last, at 6 percent. Surveys have shown the same thing for decades.

If the Bush administration thinks it is gaining the support of the majority of American Jews by supporting the intransigent positions of the Sharon government and those Jewish organizations which provide knee-jerk support for them, it is seriously mistaken. Beyond this, American Jewish groups now have the opportunity to help move the peace process forward. They should grasp that opportunity and end their long history of standing in the way of the genuine compromise which is an essential element of a lasting peace. If they did so they would, finally, be representing the constituency in whose name they speak.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln
Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.